James Gleick

We have met the Devil of Information Overload and his impish underlings, the computer virus, the busy signal, the dead link, and the PowerPoint presentation.

A good part of 'The Information' is about the transition from an oral to a literary culture. Books effected such a great transformation in the way we think about the world, our history, our logic, mathematics, you name it. I think we would be greatly diminished as a people and as a culture if the book became obsolete.

I'm trying to look at many, many things in modern life that I believe are going faster, and I'm trying to look at why they're going faster and what effect they have on us. We all know about FedEx and instant pudding, but it doesn't mean we've looked at all the consequences of our desire for speed.

Everything we care about lies somewhere in the middle, where pattern and randomness interlace.

Every time a new technology comes along, we feel we're about to break through to a place where we will not be able to recover. The advent of broadcast radio confused people. It delighted people, of course, but it also changed the world.

"Half genius and half buffoon," Freeman Dyson ... wrote. ... [Richard] Feynman struck him as uproariously American-unbuttoned and burning with physical energy. It took him a while to realize how obsessively his new friend was tunneling into the very bedrock of modern science.

We have a habit of turning to scientists when we want factual answers and artists when we want entertainment, but where are the facts about the nature of the self? Neurologists peering at PET scans and fMRIs know they aren't seeing the soul in there.

Strangely enough, the linking of computers has taken place democratically, even anarchically. Its rules and habits are emerging in the open light, rather shall behind the closed doors of security agencies or corporate operations centers.

Type 'What is th' and faster than you can find the 'e' Google is sending choices back at you: 'What is the cloud?' 'What is the mean?' 'What is the American dream?' 'What is the illuminati?' Google is trying to read your mind. Only it's not your mind. It's the World Brain.

Is privacy about government security agents decrypting your e-mail and then kicking down the front door with their jackboots? Or is it about telemarketers interrupting your supper with cold calls? It depends. Mainly, of course, it depends on whether you live in a totalitarian or a free society.

Children and scientists share an outlook on life. 'If I do this, what will happen?' is both the motto of the child at play and the defining refrain of the physical scientist.

I think we are always right to worry about damaging consequences of new technologies even as we are empowered by them. History suggests we should not panic nor be too sanguine about cool new gizmos. There's a delicate balance.

You know, entropy is associated thermodynamically, in systems involving heat, with disorder. And in an analogous way, information is associated with disorder, which seems paradoxical. But when you think about it, a bit of information is a surprise. If you already knew what the message contained, there would be no new information in it.

If we want to live freely and privately in the interconnected world of the twenty-first century - and surely we do - perhaps above all we need a revival of the small-town civility of the nineteenth century. Manners, not devices: sometimes it's just better not to ask, and better not to look.

Scientifically, information is a choice - a yes-or-no choice. In a broader sense, information is everything that informs our world - writing, painting, music, money.

Information is not knowledge, and knowledge is not wisdom. Reading - even browsing - an old book can yield sustenance denied by a database search. Patience is a virtue, gluttony a sin.

It is significant that one says book lover and music lover and art lover but not record lover or CD lover or, conversely, text lover.

Novelists are in the business of constructing consciousness out of words, and that's what we all do, cradle to grave. The self is a story we tell.

Tiny differences in input could quickly become overwhelming differences in output.... In weather, for example, this translates into what is only half-jokingly known as the Butter- fly Effect—the notion that a butterfly stirring the air today in Peking can transform storm systems next month in New York.

The history of life is written in terms of negative entropy.

Neither technology nor efficiency can acquire more time for you, because time is not a thing you have lost. It is not a thing you ever had.